Walking along, Daima led Michael followed. Down unknown streets with no markings, they stepped slow and deliberate. Humid out just slightly, the air was dry between them and silent. Daima huddled inside a light coat, hardly visible in the grey of late afternoon. Michael wore his hat light and off of his webbed and uneven hair, a light sweat wept from him at a stone pace.
	Buildings of brick and mortar, mobile homes passed them without apparent hospitality. Destination was further from thought than home actually, only ten blocks away from the nest.
	Into the side street the pair descended, stuck between a pool hall and a laundromat. The walls sweat with the perspire of the air, stained from years of persistence. Michaels’ mind was consumed with the question she had given him, and he could not chew on it without chipping tooth. He did not notice when Daima fell far behind him.
	Interrupted his auto-inquiry, “Is my wife a monster?”, a boy dressed in thick coat sat flat to the wall of the alley. His left sleeve ended at his elbow and in his right hand held was a simple knife, burrowed into the give of his wrist. The kid looked young under the haggard and soak of dirt, his whimper stifled as Michael caught his eye, and likewise caught Michael’s.
	Gasp, and Michael winced. “Stop!”
	The boy stood, but at full attention his back crooked stiffly.
	The knife aimed for Michael and he raised his hands slow to the height of his throat.
	“C’mon man,” He tried.
	“Everything you have. I’ve used this, I won’t hesitate,” his young voice cracked and shook.
	“You’re better than this. You look twenty-five at the oldest, we can talk.” Michael contacted the gutter child’s eyes with his own. Am I a fool, he asked himself. Is there still honesty left, even in hell? And he refused to look down from the boy’s eyes.
	“Fuck off, empty your pockets!” Michael remained solid.
	“I have nothing.”
	“Your boots, asshole.”
	Michael first thought, then to ask, What will you be thought of come your final day? But he had already exhausted patience of his keeper, and winced as the knife split him open in his stomach. Fell to his knees and held at his wound, he looked up to his attacker with a new, white hot rage. There was no hope, no hope for people in him anymore. His blood was a crushed ideal, he felt himself murdered.
	“Sit still,” he had heard, and felt his pockets being sorted. “Just bleed, man.”
	Heel first, slow pace, Daima creeped. Held and hidden in her hand was a chip of brick, and as she inched closer she raised it above her head. The crack of the stone against his scalp echoed across the alley before the boy fell over.
	As he did crash onto the pavement, kid let out a cry, cry of a toddler and held his gash with both hands. Daima shoved Michael to the wall, and chucked away the weapon.
	“You sound pathetic,” flatly from her, and she leaned over the back of the boy crumbled, began to strike him.
	Each punch came with a crack - the crack of her bone against his. Relentlessly, she whipped with left and to the left, and then the right, onto hands covering wound.
	Over a period of minutes he screamed. “Stop!; Please!; Help,” and as it continued, the screams shrank softer, slower. He sank, lower into the ground as if being swallowed. And inevitably the screams stopped.
	An insect crossed Daima’s eye.
	Michael had watched, and his rage fell away as he grew colder and the shrieks for help became hysteric mutterings to the wind, to nobody. When at first watching, he was so consumed by it, that were he able to move he felt he would have killed them both, by the end there was nothing to feel.
	Daima stood crane over the body, collecting her breath, and Michael rationed breath to struggle over word, “What have you done?”
	And still with less expression than there was sweat on her temple, she spoke: “I broke my hand.”